


hybrid signal

by gayprophets



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anger n other fun emotions, Angst, Body Horror, Character Study, Desolation Avatar Tim Stoker (The Magnus Archives), Desolation!Tim, Gore, Graphic Description of Injury, Grief/Mourning, Love, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Tragedy, Trans Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Trans Male Character, Trans Tim Stoker (The Magnus Archives), season 3-4, wack ass descriptions of a wack ass body
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:15:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24379312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayprophets/pseuds/gayprophets
Summary: Tim looks back at the ground to make sure there’s no more of Grimaldi’s bits lying about, ready to twitch back together and stand herfucking nightmareof a body up again, all angles and joints in the wrong places, a jack-in-the-box torso and a stolen throat wired into a fiberglass neck, stretched out far too long. She’d be different this time, no doubt. Missing pieces, but still just as garish and twisted-He’s moving before he registers what he sees, panic catching in his chest like his ribs are made of kindling. Jon’s face is peering out beneath a slab of drywall, beneath a supporting beam, just a dark,weteye, a scrap of hair, and a pool of blood.-tim, jon, and the pain of trying to do your best in spite of it all. on inhumanity, love, betrayal, and forgiveness.
Relationships: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker
Comments: 28
Kudos: 243





	hybrid signal

**Author's Note:**

> warning in ch 1 for:  
> body horror  
> graphic injury  
> eye trauma  
> impalement  
> a brief instance of vomiting

They say you don’t hear the shot that kills you - and really, that might be true for a headshot, but not for anything else. Because for a moment Tim hears the explosion start elsewhere in the museum, less a  _ bang _ or a  _ pow _ and more an overwhelming  _ sound _ that’s so loud it feels like it’s coming from  _ inside _ of him, and he gets a half-second flash of one of the shaped charges punching through a wall like it’s  _ paper, _ like a meteor through the atmosphere. His thumb against the switch is lighting him up inside, a completed circuit. He sees Grimaldi in the brief hit of visibility, Jon’s slight form beside her, her arm locked tight around his throat, his eyes many and huge and dark with pupils that are a terrible and brilliant white, he can’t tell if it’s the Unknowing or just what Jon  _ is, _ when you peel every pretense away, and everything is bright and  _ heat _ -

Then the shockwave hits him. The world boils down to a point of nothing and agony, smaller than the eye of a needle, his body a subatomic speck of a pain that is so  _ much _ it doesn’t feel like anything at all but  _ consuming. _ That circuit in his pulverized ribcage catches with feverish power and then sputters like it’s about to leave him; after feeling nothing for so long save for apathy and rage Tim grabs onto its newness with two hands and holds it close. Squeezes it tight. Asks it to please,  _ please _ stay.

He could use the company.

-

Tim wakes up coughing. He goes to curl onto his side- which some small part of him is shocked to find he still has- and something stops him with a terrible pulling sensation through his abdomen. He opens his eyes. The sky is black with smoke. The clouds beyond it are flat and grey, like a fog wall, keeping him from anything he could fall up into. He hadn’t done a lot of research on the Vast, but it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, falling forever or lost in the deep.

There is a short piece of rebar lanced through his stomach. Or, more accurately, his intestines- it juts out at an angle just above his iliac crest, through his shredded shirt, and pins him to the ground. It doesn’t hurt- which is to say  _ everything _ hurts, so much that this doesn’t register- but the sight panics him anyways on an instinctual, base level: something is  _ in _ his body. Something has him like a bug on a styrofoam platter, he needs it out, he needs it out  _ out out- _

He flails and grabs the rebar and  _ yanks, _ inhaling to wind up a scream, which sends him coughing again. After briefly struggling to tear it from the dirt, the rebar comes free easy, like pulling a wire from unbaked polymer clay. It doesn’t hurt any more than he does already.

It’s only when the coughing stops (he hacks out a thick dark clot of something, slimy and wet, when he twists and spits it against a piece of shattered drywall it sticks there) and Tim has it in his hand- two feet long, rusted brown, the grooves sharp against his palm- that he realizes exactly what he’s done and how  _ fucked _ he is. His hand flies to put pressure on the wound- which he knows won’t save him, he just ripped out the thing keeping his  _ insides _ from being  _ outside _ \- expecting gushing hot wet blood and dripping bits of tissue. 

Tim finds a hole.

It’s neat, a perfect match for the rebar he’d flung away from him. There is no blood. No gore. He finishes his roll onto his side, which jars no injuries, and brings his hand to the other end of the puncture. There is no viscera. There is no gore.

Tim brings his hands up to check for blood- maybe he just can’t feel it, all of him is a bright spot of pain, sensation a wash of  _ hurts more _ or  _ hurts less _ \- and there’s-

His left hand is gone. There is no arterial spray, gushing from the disarticulated joint of his elbow. He can see the off-white tendon, split, hanging loosely against his bicep. The end of his humerus sticks out of raw red muscle, greyish under the coat of dirt.

Tim reaches back down to the wound, and carefully eases a finger inside. It doesn’t hurt more than the rest of him. His body is  _ hot _ inside.

He takes out the finger and pinches the flesh together. The hole closes. When he lets go, it stays shut. Tim sucks in a breath to laugh and starts the coughing up again.

He realizes, as the fit starts to wind down, that he can’t hear himself. Everything is a high pitched droning whine, the noise pressing tight to his ears, making him want to rip the fucking things off- it  _ hurts. _ Everything  _ hurts. _ He inhales again, and this time he doesn’t cough. So he stands.

Tim is careful not to glance at himself- he doesn’t want to know what state he’s in- and begins picking his way through the smoking rubble, back to the street. Pieces of the wax museum are burning still, and something in him wants to walk through the fire, feel it kiss his feet, lick up his calves. He wants to turn himself into a funeral pyre. He thinks- he thinks he knows what it means. 

He just doesn’t want to understand yet. It can wait. 

It can wait. 

A chunk of white plastic catches his eye, lurid and harsh in the grey-brown-rust of the collapsed building, something disgustingly fake. Grimaldi’s hand. No. _ Arm. _ A whole forearm, strips of ill-fitting, chalky skin hanging off it and- well. Tim needs an arm. Might as well pick up a souvenir. A clipped laugh bursts out of him at the thought. An arm for a brother; a death for a death. Tim always gets his own back.

The plastic is unpleasantly cool beneath his fingers, and the skin sloughs off as he shakes it. Something tells him to  _ line his elbow up with the plastic joint, push the bone in, _ and he does it without thinking, then gasps and drops it as the white plastic bubbles and blackens against his skin-

The arm doesn’t fall. It stays, attached to his elbow. Tim stares at it blankly. He closes the hand into a fist, slow, and the fingers clack against each other.

He looks back at the ground to make sure there’s no more of Grimaldi’s bits lying about, ready to twitch back together and stand her  _ fucking nightmare _ of a body up again, all angles and joints in the wrong places, a jack-in-the-box torso and a stolen throat wired into a fiberglass neck, stretched out far too long. She’d be different this time, no doubt. Missing pieces, but still just as garish and twisted-

He’s moving before he registers what he sees, panic catching in his chest like his ribs are made of kindling. Jon’s face is peering out beneath a slab of drywall, beneath a supporting beam, just a dark,  _ wet _ eye, a scrap of hair, and a pool of blood.

Tim grabs onto the beam that crosses Jon’s chest with both hands and  _ hauls, _ his combat boots slipping against the ashy ground. He’s not as strong as he used to be, he quit going to the gym after he stopped PT, (there was nothing for him there but watchful eyes resting on his scars, and he was too  _ tired _ for it anyways) but it’s enough to feel it start to lift. It hits the ground on the other side of Jon’s body with a thick  _ whud, _ and he goes for the drywall, which crumbles and ashes beneath his fingers. Jon’s face is grey and slack, a thin line of blood oozing from his temple as Tim kneels and turns him over. There’s no sensation in Grimaldi’s arm, so he’s careful not to squeeze or hold too rough as he maneuvers Jon’s head into his lap, trying to support his neck. Jon’s  _ crying, _ tear tracks cutting through the grey dust that coats him completely. 

The second Jon’s eyes are on him, Tim feels the weight of the Beholding bearing down like the rumble of nearby thunder, the feeling a punch to the chest. A long metal sliver skewers his left eye like a toothpick through an olive. The shard cuts through his upper eyelid, splitting it neatly in half. It is the only one tearing up, trying to push out the intrusive object. 

He very,  _ very _ carefully pinches the metal between two fingers-  _ his, _ not Grimaldi’s, plastic doesn’t have any  _ grip _ \- and starts to ease it out, gentle, trying to keep it straight so as not to do any more damage. Jon’s body immediately jerks, back arching, and Tim presses the mannequin arm down on his chest with a hiss, keeping him immobile until the thing is out. He throws the metal aside. Jon’s body goes limp and still once more.

Too still. 

Tim waits for his chest to rise for a long moment, then presses his fingers just below the bolt of Jon’s jaw, hard, reaching, searching. No pulse.

Laughter bubbles up in his raw throat again, but doesn’t actually manage to pass his lips, swamped too quickly by horror, and then  _ relief. _ It’s  _ over. _ It’s finally  _ over. _ This whole bloody mess out and done with one miserable and literal  _ bang. _ He leans down and presses his forehead to Jon’s; it’s cool, but not cold.  _ Thank you, _ he thinks, again.  _ I don’t forgive you, but thank you. _ His hair is slick under Tim’s fingers, wet with sweat and blood, his skin tender and soft. 

He’d touched Jon like this, once. Back during the worm attack. They’d barely managed to get away from a wave of them, the extinguisher running low, terrifyingly light in his hands, and it’d been silent but for their harsh breathing and Jon’s limping footsteps for a few minutes. Jon’s breathing had gotten louder. And louder. And louder.

“Jon,” Tim said, stopping at a branch in the tunnel and scanning it up and down - no worms. “Are you-,”

“Fine,” Jon grated out, low in his throat. Tim looked back to him. Jon leaned heavily against the wall, his face greyscale in the torchlight, lips parted and eyes peeled wide. “I can’t-  _ breathe.” _

Tim had reached for him then, after another check down the halls. Tucked his fire extinguisher under his arm, his phone into his shirt pocket. He wasn’t good in an emergency, not really, but he  _ was _ good at pushing aside his own panic to take care of someone else's.

(He and Danny used to get separated from their mum, not often enough to get used to it, but often enough to be a problem. This was before Danny got to be charming, when he was shy and quiet, so Tim would always have to choke down his own fear to say, _ see Danny, it’s alright, we’ll talk to that person, _ gripping his hand tight-

Some habits die hard. People die harder.)

Tim pressed Jon’s hot hand to his stomach, asked,  _ feel that? _ Said,  _ breathe with me. _ Ducked down to press his forehead to Jon’s when he wouldn’t stop glancing at the tunnels, his breath going sharper with every glance, said,  _ look at me, _ and Jon had.  _ We’re getting out of this, _ he’d said.  _ I won’t leave you behind. _ Jon had mumbled something back-  _ I can’t, _ maybe, or  _ I don’t, I won’t, _ the exact words lost to time.  _ You will, _ Tim said.  _ Trust me. Do you trust me? _ And Jon nodded once, sharp, their noses bumping painfully, and his sweat was cold on Tim’s forehead. Tim cupped his hand around the back of Jon’s head, knuckles scraping raw against the stone of the walls, and Jon clung to him, one hand on his stomach, one clawing at his shoulder, the back of his neck, into his hair. Tim shut his eyes and breathed deep for Jon, with Jon, until they could move on. 

In the present, Tim shuts his eyes, breathes deep. The air is rancid, smokey, and Jon smells like dust. There’s a deeper base note to his skin, like old, old books, like  _ power. _

Tim sits back up to move Jon off of him, to stand up, walk away. Instead he watches in horror as Jon’s eye seals itself back up, the eyelid pulling itself back together, the haematoma turning from red to brown to sick yellow and then fading. It leaves no scar. His eyes blink once, then shut, and movement kicks up behind the closed lids. 

Dreaming.

Tim could just about scream. He doesn’t.

He hauls Jon up and slings Jon’s arm over his shoulder instead- something is broken in it, and it  _ crunches _ and wraps oddly behind Tim’s neck before snapping straight. His ribs sink and pop with crepitus under Tim’s hands as he gathers him into his arms, then press back into his fingers straight and sure, as though they were never damaged. Blood seeps from various wounds on his body before they seal- but only where the flow works with the press of gravity. There’s no heartbeat to pump out the blood. His body  _ crunches _ and  _ grinds _ and  _ snaps _ in Tim’s arms the whole walk towards the street, a dislocated hip jerking his whole leg as it pops back into place, his shattered fingers clawing at the back of Tim’s ruined shirt as they set themselves back to rights. As though that sliver to the eye had been the only thing preventing the healing process, and it’s all catching up quickly to make up for the delay.

Tim puts him down on the scorched sidewalk. Peels the left eye open again out of sheer curiosity, and it focuses on him, pupil contracting in the light. For a second there’s a flare of that  _ white _ in it again, a lens deep inside the pupil, but there’s nothing behind his gaze. He is being watched, but it is not Jon who is seeing. The damp tears left on Jon’s skin begin to steam under his fingers, so Tim makes himself pull away. Leaves him there.

He runs into Basira a block away. He almost doesn’t recognize her; she’s standing on a street corner with her fingertips resting delicately on her own cheeks, so utterly still she could have been carved of granite. She’s mumbling to herself, completely silent. There’s no one around them. The streets are empty, everyone fled either away from or towards the explosion.

“Basira?” he asks as he walks up to her. At least, he thinks he does. He can’t hear himself. Her head whips around to face him, her dark eyes rimmed entirely by white, skin pallid. There’s a bit of blood at the corner of her mouth, a bruise quickly forming there. Her headscarf is askew.

She says something- he gets a  _ you, _ maybe, at the beginning, but he’s never been good at reading lips. His ears buzz with phantom noise.

“Your headscarf-,” he tries, not quite knowing what to say, his eyes carefully averted. He starts to take off his coat to give her some cover, even though it’s more rip than fabric. Before he manages to pull his arms from the sleeves, she reaches up, pats it, tugs the underscarf back over her hair. She says something else.

“I can’t hear you,” Tim says, helpless. “Basira- I can’t hear you-”

“You’re not alive,” she snaps, a sharp, blown-out yell that makes Tim flinch back, and then she reaches out towards his head and pulls at  _ something. _ There’s another putty-like sensation as she tugs it out of his temple: a jagged triangle of black metal, maybe three inches in diameter. Tim brings a hand up to his face and feels it, touches skin and then bone and then something that  _ squishes _ like jello and can only be his brain-

He bends over and vomits. It hisses and steams on the sidewalk, on their shoes. There’s blood in that, at least. Basira doesn’t so much as step back as it splatters across her boots.

Tim smooths the bone back over the exposed patch, then the skin. It slides easy beneath his fingertips, like touching candle wax that’s only half cooled. He knows what it means. He knows what he is.

“EMS is that way,” he croaks to the sidewalk, pointing without looking. He had to duck into an alley to avoid being spotted when they whipped past, sirens he could barely hear blaring. He spits out more bile- this time it evaporates before it hits the ground. She leaves.

-

Tim takes baths. He’s always preferred them, although he does take showers more often- they’re quicker, use less water, and his flatmates do get (rightfully) pissy when he hogs the bathroom. He’s not at his flat now, though. 

The house he’s in now has no security beyond a lock that melts with just his fingertips on the doorknob, and from the thin layer of dust he can only assume it’s either abandoned or the owners are on vacation. There’s a whisper at the back of his head that says  _ things have value here, _ so he’s leaning towards the latter. Tim goes through the house slowly, careful not to touch the family photos on the walls that smile out at him, the scratched piano, the old, tarnished jewelry in the master bedroom, the years of childish drawings on the fridge-  _ these things have value. _ People will come back for them.

The whining in his ears is dying down. It’s quiet here.

He lifts some of the clothes left in one of the closets that seem like they might fit him- jeans, a T-shirt, a belt, some socks, a pair of tennis shoes that are a bit big- then ghosts into the master bath. He’ll have to stuff the shoes, like he used to do as an insecure 14 year old. 

There’s a mirror, of course. It is large and very clean with a thin brass frame. He smiles at his reflection, and his injuries twist. Something has split his cheek open, down to the offwhite bone. Filth sticks to the inside in a thick muddy coat, as it does everywhere else; he is grey and black and rust from head to toe. His nose is at a sharp angle, and- He’s somehow only missing one tooth, bottom right, just before the canine. He puts his nose back with a  _ crunch, _ and his stomach turns, but there’s nothing left in it to throw up. His neck is remarkably unscathed, but his clothes are a write off, of course. He reaches out and lifts it off the wall, sets it down on the floor, gentle, glass to the tile. He doesn’t need to see any more of  _ that. _

He runs the bath cold- it feels like he’s running a fever, aching from the inside out- and strips as it fills, dropping the scraps that could only be called clothes if one were feeling  _ extremely _ generous into the wastebasket. His boots go in too; something’s cut the left one open along the side, and the tread has melted into almost nonexistence. Tim goes to sit on the floor with his back to the wall, but things stick out of him and prevent any actual contact. It’s a shame, really. He liked those boots. He can hear his father’s voice in his head when he looks at them, a speech from back when he was 13, having just come out-  _ Tim, the thing a man needs most in the world is a good pair of boots. _ He’d rolled his eyes a little at the time,  _ Dad, doesn’t everyone?  _ But it’d made him feel included, welcomed, especially when he’d had to sit through Danny receiving the same lecture in the mall years later, not allowed to wander off despite being  _ long _ since old enough to do so.

He hasn’t seen his father in a while. He doesn’t think he’s going to be seeing his father ever again.

The water starts to steam and hiss against his skin when he shuts off the tap and steps in. He’s not surprised. It doesn’t hurt. 

(No more than the rest of him, anyway.)

He spends some time pulling things out of himself, metal and wood clattering down onto the bland green tile or thumping against the bathmat, loud over the gentle roiling sound of the water as it boils. He takes a white shard of plastic from his chest, just below one of his scars. It matches his new hand perfectly, which is gleaming after he scrubbed it with a washcloth. He whips the shard at the wall and smooths over the gap in his skin with ease.

He is not quite wax, he learns.

His body is… flesh, to an extent. He removes shrapnel from his thigh, a thick, heavy bolt. Underneath his skin, still a bit sooty despite his careful washing with soap that smells of lemon and sugar, his muscles are wet and raw and do not shift like clay when he touches them. Other parts, however, are more malleable: he smooths his skin down over Grimaldi’s arm until it seems natural and carves in fingernails for himself, pinches together his gaping wounds, pulls apart his right leg to tuck his shattered tibia and fibula back inside, shove all the pieces of it together, sculpts himself back shut. He puts in more water when too much boils off, the metal of the tap a cold that he doesn’t feel even when he sticks his head under the faucet and shuts his eyes. The bottom and sides of the tub are black with grime, the washcloth more stain than fabric.

There are still  _ bits _ in him. Tim can feel them shifting when he stretches a leg above the water to inspect a broken toe, when he reaches his arms in front of him, when he twists at the waist to grab the shampoo. Some of it even seems to make up his missing pieces: rubber bands standing in for snapped tendons, metal replacing broken off bits of bones, chunks of leather padding out missing muscle, and Grimaldi’s arm, of course. It doesn’t hurt, which, well. His body feels like the very moment when he’s accidentally touched a pan fresh out the oven, the  _ oh shit _ just before the searing heat, the nerves set alight, the anticipatory pain that makes one yank away from the source, only he can’t pull back. It  _ is _ him. 

It lives inside him, in the space between his ribs, roosting like a parrot in a cage much too small, scraping up his insides as it looks for a way out, a place to stretch its wings. He can’t even feel invaded, misled- he remembers the lightless seconds of the explosion, the  _ thing _ that flickered in his chest. Tim knew what it was. 

Tim’s heard of psychogenic death. Voodoo death. A body under such stress and emotional pressure that it shuts itself down. He’d written a paper on it in uni, thought it was interesting. He didn’t fully believe it, not back then: that a person could be so terrified that their body would give out on them. That someone could so wholly believe in their own demise that it came true, that they invited it in. Life isn’t a wish granting fairy; belief has effects, but it doesn’t create wholesale. He’d thought about it again, after Danny. He wondered if that was what happened- if Danny had just been so- if he had passed from terror, and not from Grimaldi slowly rending his meat from his skin, like a molting insect. If he’d been dead even when he’d sat on Tim’s couch, it just hadn’t caught up with him yet. Norepinephrine keeping his heart contracting, adrenaline keeping him talking, his knuckles white on Tim’s hand as he leaned against his side, and once that ran out-

Now he’s wondering if he’s suffering from some version of it. Psychogenic life. If he wanted so  _ badly _ to have something other than  _ nothing _ that he created this existence for himself, because death's total lack of being was too simply empty for him to bear, even within his own apathetic rage. If he’d wished hard enough to call attention to himself, thought about continuing onwards to the point where he created a  _ door, _ his finger on a button turning the knob, believing until-

He invited it in. Belief has power. He knows this now. Belief creates. He should go find his professor and offer himself up for an interview.

A cloud of acrid smoke leaves his mouth when he laughs bitterly, black and smelling of burnt plastic. Tim scrubs his face roughly with his hands and, not knowing what to do with himself, with his  _ body, _ with the bubbling  _ anger _ and  _ frustration _ (because  _ what the fuck is he supposed to do now, it’s not like he can go home), _ he lashes out, sharp, striking the wall behind the tub with the side of his fist with a  _ thunk _ that he doesn’t even have time to register before the tile and plasterboard explodes out at him in a shower of dust and wood fragments.

Tim sits for a moment, blinking dust out of his eyelashes and coated once more in grit, hand frozen out where the wall used to be, stunned. The shocked feeling bleeds into a slick sort of satisfaction, a deep satiation that makes him feel a bit out of control, and a little sick inside. His breath hitches momentarily, but he hasn’t been able to cry in months. He certainly isn’t going to be able to start now.

He rinses himself off once more with the showerhead and doesn’t bother with a towel- he’s dry almost the second he shuts off the water. The clothes he’d left on the sink are a wash, so he nicks a second set from another room and dresses fast, conscious of the fact that someone  _ definitely _ heard that and has now called 999. He slips out the back door and hops the fence with ease, trusting that the tug in his gut will lead him back to London.

**Author's Note:**

> i did not think i was ever gonna publish this but. i did. i did. i'm so very incredibly nervous about it. hope you liked it. more jontim in chapter 2 and a resolution. 
> 
> title from Ocean Vuong- “To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”
> 
> shoutout to nathan and danny for talking the idea over with me, and thank you, as always, to sunny. you are a fantastic beta. love you. 
> 
> [you can find me @themlet on tumblr](themlet.tumblr.com). comments and kudos are, as always, appreciated. i love you all!


End file.
